Robbie Ross: Oscar Wilde's Devoted Friend.

Robbie Ross: Oscar Wilde's Devoted Friend by Jonathan Fryer (Car roll and Graf, $25) The list of friends and acquaintances whom Robert Baldwin Ross accumulated over his lifetime reads like a who's who of the literary, social, artistic, and political worlds of Britain from the late Victorian era through World War I. Best known as Oscar Wilde's first male lover and, ultimately, his literary executor, Ross was remarkable for his constancy and generosity to all his friends, his influential artistic tastes (although he abhorred impressionism), and his commitment to keeping Wilde's legacy alive. Robbie Ross is pretty conventional as a biography, but Robbie Ross the man shines through.

Chinn lives in New York and teaches American literature at Trinity College in Connecticut.